Daily Digest 7/1 - Good News Friday: Antarctic Ozone Hole Healing, Is There Life After Leather?

This is Good News Friday, where we find some good economic, energy, and environmental news and share it with PP readers. Please send any positive news to [email protected] with subject header "Good News Friday." We will save and post weekly. Enjoy!

Economy

The Education Department has partnered with more than 100 correctional facilities, and agreed to provide prisoners either classroom instruction, online programs or a hybrid of both. The department said it received more than 200 applications from schools that wanted to be involved.

Across Canada, ordinary citizens, distressed by news reports of drowning children and the shunning of desperate migrants, are intervening in one of the world’s most pressing problems. Their country allows them a rare power and responsibility: They can band together in small groups and personally resettle — essentially adopt — a refugee family. In Toronto alone, hockey moms, dog-walking friends, book club members, poker buddies and lawyers have formed circles to take in Syrian families. The Canadian government says sponsors officially number in the thousands, but the groups have many more extended members.

The rescue package will not prevent Puerto Rico from missing the payment due on Friday on a $2 billion debt, and Republican congressional leaders labored to the end to reassure conservatives that the bill is not a bailout. Instead, the legislation would allow the island’s government to restructure its $72 billion total debt so it can manage payments, and create a bipartisan oversight board mostly of outsiders to guide what is sure to be a painful recovery process.

The new discovery, estimated to be about 54 billion cubic feet in size in just one small region of the valley, could fill more than 1.2 million MRI scanners—of which there are only an estimated 25,000 actually in existence throughout the world. Humans use around eight billion cubic feet of helium per year, so it represents a sizeable addition to the dwindling total reserves previously believed to be available, but it also gives hope for helium prospectors. Previously, the gas was always discovered by accident, but the team's discovery will now allow people to proactively hunt for more.

Sam Hudson is part of a growing group of scientists returning to renewable resources for material development. The resulting textiles are slowly moving out of the lab and into the commercialisation phase, which means you could someday see them as an option at your local car dealer. Carmakers are searching for novel combinations of comfort, performance and good looks with, in many cases, a healthy dose of sustainability. Materials science has progressed to the point that you can make a truly luxurious synthetic fabric, or lend new qualities to tried-and-true options. Not that there’s anything wrong with velour.

As the ozone layer heals, it is expected that seasonal growth of the ozone hole will occur later in the season. Observations of the 2015 ozone hole were in line with these expectations. In 2015, the ozone hole was considerably smaller during the months of August and September than it was during previous years. Although it reached record size during October of that year, the authors’ climate and atmospheric models indicate that this was an anomaly related to volcanic eruptions.

Most of the farms under Ray Benson’s purview turn out commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton. His aim: to help big ag leave a smaller environmental footprint. Benson, who studied agronomy and crop science as a University of Arkansas grad student, advocates for technology that helps area farmers monitor and, ultimately, reduce the amount of water, fertilizer, and pesticides used in their fields.

They also may have been used for ceremonious rites of passage, researchers say. “Similar suggestions have been made for the ritual use of caves in the Neolithic of the Mediterranean, for instance,” Daniel Brown, an astronomy lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, told me in an email. The idea Brown and his colleagues are exploring is whether stellar alignment was a key component of rituals in these ancient spaces. One theory, he says, is that the structures were designed to reveal a certain star to a person staying in the chamber—where the aperture would make the star visible days or even a week before it could be seen otherwise.

Gold & Silver

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No, those aren't the odds of the US ""justice""system investigating the massive and blatant voting irregularities during the Democratic primaries as the Austrian justice system did yesterday. Kudos to at least one functioning system in the world!

Belarus has launched a new series of coins and banknotes after redenominating its currency by 10,000 to one, the Gazeta news website reported Friday. A new Belarussian five ruble bank note will be equivalent to the old 50 thousand ruble note.

Old banknotes will be generally accepted in place of the new denominations until the end of the year, and then in Belarus’ National Bank from 2017 to 2021. The five new coins in Belarus are the first to be in circulation since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko announced the planned devaluation in November 2015.

The Belarussian ruble, one of the world’s worst performing currencies, lost 60 percent of its value last year, with the country's economy falling into recession after 20 years of economic growth.

So imagine if you had ten thousands dollars in hundreds. That's a solid stack a little less than an inch thick. Now imagine you hand that in to the bank teller and they hand you back ... a single 'new' dollar...

Your only consolation is that the new dollar has a different look, and new colors.

Do you hold that dollar...or do you spend it pronto? That was a trick question, of course you spend it, instantly.

The world’s freight moves via trucks. Even when goods are flown or shipped in containers around the world, delivery to the end of the supply chain is by truck. And while the carbon footprint for a freight-hauling truck is much greater than any car, SUV, or small truck, so far no one has presented a green solution for large trucks.

Dimethyl ether has been used and proposed for an alternative to diesel. It can be made from NG, coal, and biomass. It burns relatively clean, can be used in diesel engines(with minor adjustments). Doesn't have quite the "oomph" that diesel supplies, but it might be a transition fuel until we see how practical electric powered transport works for heavy goods. Globalization has been predicated on cheap energy and has long term implications for the future. Local economies still make logical sense for most of the things we consume. Fresh pineapple from the Philippines, strawberries from California, kiwis from New Zealand still constitute a luxury,IMHO, Rail and ocean transport have worked pretty well for a while now, so maybe a rethinking is in order on our options heading forward. Interesting article, however.

While scientists initially assumed the heat and luminescence of the star must make it the largest in the universe—a theory lent credence by the star appearing much bigger than other objects in the sky—they said the data actually appear to refute such a notion.

"Apparently it's gigantic simply because it's closer to us than any other star," Kivens said. "Which would also account for why we feel this particular star's heat during the day but are not warmed by the tiny blinking stars we see at night."

LONDON The prospect of further cuts in interest rates and bond-buying to support a fractured global economy kept stock markets on the up in Europe and Asia on Friday, and drove U.S. and European government bond yields to their lowest in years. Signs ...